Still Life No 3

Date: 07 May 2012 11:16:20

Yesterday was a very busy day. We were out for lunch and I spent most of the morning and most of the afternoon applying for jobs. I'm looking for work in the UK teaching English at Summer Schools or at Language Schools. Mr D did some serious sitting down and looking at our budget - something we've not done for a long while - and discovered that, unless

1) I earn more

2) He gets a job and/or earns more

we won't be able to carry on living where we are for much more than 18 months. So our plans for a lazy-ish summer and a holiday over near Floss's part of the world have morphed into Mr D doing mailshots to places that might want websites and thinking about starting a market stall, and me applying to spend 6 weeks in the hectic busy atmosphere of a Summer School. Yikes! I might have to become active!!! Of course, my age is against me - I suspect these places value youth and fitness over age and experience, but I might be pleasantly surprised. There are a couple I fancy more than others - one in Glasgow, and one in Liverpool. These are with adults and older teens, and are not residential. But, of course, don't pay as much! We shall see.

I have spent a couple of nights lying awake worrying, which is a little foolish. It's not a case of send-us-food-parcels, or being-thrown-out-of-the-house, (not yet, anyway!) and it won't be for quite a while. But we do need to work harder at earning money and spending less (my 240€ a month petrol bill doesn't help!)

So, I need to bring my worrying mind to rest and try to trust God - not that I think that it's his job to get us out of the situation, nor to "send" me a job. Lovely though it would be, I don't expect a parcel of anything to drop out of the sky. It's our situation and we need to sort it. But, even though I think all that, I still need to trust that God will lead me/us to making the right decisions to move forward. I need to rest in him, to let my soul be still, and to remember that Jesus said:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

In my "Still Life" book for the first week in May there are two quotations. One printed:

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you; not as the world gives do I give you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid".

The other is something I have written on 4th May, 1994. I don't know whether it is a snippet of a poem that I read, or something I composed myself:

There is a God, some say; a deep but dazzling darkness

Aha! When I typed that into Google I was taken to a website that tells me this is a phrase from a poem by the metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan. The poem is too long to reproduce here, but this is a link to the poem which is called "The Night" .